My portfolio pulls its projects directly from Vercel

My portfolio doesn’t use a manually maintained list of projects anymore.

gary-taylor.com

It pulls them directly from my Vercel account.

That sounds simple until you realize deployment data and portfolio data are two very different things.

Vercel knows:

• The project name • The framework • When it was created • Its connected repository • Its current production deployment • The aliases attached to that deployment

But it doesn’t know the story.

It doesn’t know what problem I was solving, what I learned, what stage of my career I was in, or which projects should actually appear publicly.

So I built a small content layer around it.

Vercel supplies the live project infrastructure. Supabase stores the curated portfolio information—titles, descriptions, categories, images, ordering, visibility, and career context.

The portfolio merges both sources at runtime.

That means I can deploy a project and connect it to the portfolio without copying the entire record into another system. I still control how the work is presented, but the live technical information stays connected to its source.

This week exposed an interesting edge case.

Some project cards were using old deployment URLs. The deployments had been replaced, so the screenshot service faithfully captured a Vercel 404 page.

The mistake was assuming that project-name.vercel.app would always be the correct address.

It isn’t.

Projects can have custom domains, generated aliases, team aliases, and manually assigned production aliases. Some attached custom domains can even remain in the project configuration after their DNS stops working.

I updated the system to read the alias attached to the current production deployment, prioritize a durable Vercel address, and fall back to a branded project card if screenshot generation ever fails.

The bigger lesson: automation is only useful when it understands which data is authoritative.

Vercel owns deployment state.

Supabase owns editorial context.

The portfolio brings them together.